Rome Burning
by The Lady Avaritia
Summary: Few great men are born. Most are made. None live. Some die. All do both, and one does neither.


**Rome Burning**

**i. Brutus Being**

_Few great men are born. Most are made. None live. Some die. All do both, and one does neither. _

I'll tell you are riddle, for a start: You're waiting for a train and you are waiting alone. You don't know where the train will take you. You don't even know when it's coming. It doesn't matter and you wait anyway. Even knowing that the train will never come, even after seeing it crash and burn three stops before yours, this off-schedule train to nowhere, you wait for it. You stay firmly rooted in one place, and you wait for it to come. How can you be doing that to yourself and to those around you? How can it not matter? This is your riddle. This is your life.

The train rocks rhythmically back and forth in that soothing way that trains have about them, with a gentle rocking that is oddly lulling. You rest your head against the damn glass window of the first class compartment, looking outside into the darkness of the late afternoon. Winry is curled up beside you in the red plush seat, her long pale legs at an angle, her chin resting on her knees. Her eyes are closed, long golden lashes caressing her cheeks, and she looks like a sleeping doll. You have no way of telling if she is awake. Frankly, you don't want to disturb her right now.

The train's rocing slows down painfully to a crawl, and eventually stops. The rain and darkness obscure the station.

"LAST STOP, RISEMBOOL."

You put a hand on her delicate ivory shoulder, tentatively, uncertainly. She startles and looks up at you, blinking slowly.

"We're home, Winry," you tell her softly, and you know, in your heart that it's a lie. Home is nowhere. For you, home is nowhere. There is a saying – don't ever make a person your home. And you think that this particular warning came on too late, and you smile bitterly, because you don't want to cry.

Granny greets you with a slap and a sob, her small fragile body shaking.

"I'm back, Granny," you say, your voice cracking dangerously, "I'm back for good."

"You were supposed to return three children to me, not two," she tells you, her voice somewhere between angry and falling apart. You flinch, and draw in on yourself, your shoulders hunching. You are trying to dwarf yourself, take as little space as possible, because you are entitled to none.

Winry spends most of her days in bed. She almost doesn't leave her room. She cries a lot, but other times she just stares blankly at the wall, and only Granny can convince her to eat. Her grief is like a punch in the gut. Repeatedly. Violently.

She returns to the workshop one day, and you only recognize that because the loud clanging and banging of vigorous work wakes you up at to-hell-with-this-o'clock from your thin nightmare riddled sleep. You blink your eyes blearily, stuff your feet into fluffy sleepers and throw a sheet over your body instead of a robe as you follow the noise. Winry is repeatedly smashing a prototype of an automail arm with a loud piercing sound. You can hear, briefly, beneath the noise, her sobs. You leave her be. You are angry. He's made her cry again, and he's not even here.

You don't suppose that the grief has really hit you yet, and it's been months. It's all a lot like a dream, really. As if you are looking at the world though a veil that won't bloody lift. You are in shock, as if nothing has actually happened. As if, maybe, your life up until now has been a dream, and you are not used to waking up. But it's not that easy. It's not that simple.

Winry starts to smile, and you think to yourself that maybe this is the mark of something new. Maybe the world is returning to its axis. You smile with her, though inside you find only icebergs. Maybe this is your body's way of protecting your mind. You can't know. You begin to notice things – Winry's long lean legs. Her flat taned stomach, and how small and oval her shoulders are. The curve of her lips. The swell of her breasts in her shirts that she wears with no bra underneath because it's uncomfortable. Maybe she begins to notice things too… you can't really tell. Her eyes linger on your chest sometimes, when you're chopping wood out back and sweat is tickling down your skin. You've gotten taller, and your face has become sharper, more defined. You spent hours studying it in the mirror, looking desperately to find a trace of your other half.

Winry almost kisses you. The icebergs melt. You push her away, and you cry.

This isn't right. This will never be right. Winry was never meant for you. She was always, always… Ed's girl. Her heart was always the home that Ed wanted to return to… And Ed was never coming back. And finally the realization hits you, after so many months of repression and denial, that ED IS NEVER COMING BACK.

You were supposed to return with three children… but you only came with two. You did not bring Ed back. Not even his body for burial. His life for yours, the ultimate equivalent exchange. And you have never hated that useless body of yours as much as you do in the moment when it dawns upon you that the only reason you wanted to taste quiche in the first place was because he described it as tasty.

**ii. Fall Nero**

Stand at the edge of a universe that you cannot see, and rule and empire of blood and ashes. Set the city of your dreams on fire and watch your dreams burn. Set the fucking sky on fire. Your world is cold and black.

"Is he…?" Breda asks tentively.

Hawkeye nods. "At the graveyard."

The 'again' hanging at the end of the sentence remains unspoken. At the graveyeard. The fuhrer mourns. His posture is perfectly straight, his tall lean figure clad in a heavy black coat, his hands clasped over the top of his cane, his head bowed as if in prayer. The black granite of the monument is simple, yet elegant, engraved only with a name and a date. The Fullmetal Alchemist, or whatever they managed to salvage from him to bury. A funeral in central, an elevation to rank Brigadier General. The young boy-hero of the country. Edward Elric, the last stepping stone on his way to the throne of an empire build on flesh and bones.

The world you live in isn't real, because you cannot see it. The world you live in isn't real and death is the only way out.

The furor mourns the death is a national hero. Roy Mustang mourns the death of a friend. He did so much, he fought so hard. But now the brat is in a place where he cannot follow.

Stand at the edge of a universe that you cannot see, and rule and empire of blood and ashes. Set the city of your dreams on fire and watch your dreams burn. Set the fucking sky on fire. Your world is cold and black.

**iii.** **Alexander Dreaming**

Edward Elric dies a rather spectacular death that involves explosions that take down almost three and a half military labs, a lot of bright light and blood and flesh splattered all over the place. There are whispers of unethical alchemy that are quickly hushed. He was working on high-tech research. He is a hero. This is what they say. They feed the story to the newspapers.

Only a few people know the reality of it. That yes, there was unethical alchemy. Human sacrifice. And the sacrifice had been Ed himself. The price of Alphonse's body paid in flesh, blood and metal pieces, because he couldn't live in a world where it was his fault that his baby brother lost everything. Because he couldn't live in a world where he was complete.

Edward Elric would not know what to do with happiness or completion unless he was the one paying the price for it. So he had.

"He told me once," Al whispers softly, brokenly, "He told me once that if he ever got his whole body back… he wouldn't know what to do with it. That… that he wouldn't know how to live normally…"

When you hate yourself as much as Edward Elric hates himself… what does the world truly look like? Imagine existing in a universe where you blink and reality shivers, where you take a breath, exhale and a nation falls down before you. Alchemy is the absolute power, and with power comes the absolute responsibility, but a bone socket and a metal one can only hold the weight of so much guilt for so long. Edward had killed himself, passively, but almost as certainly as if he had put a gun against his temple and pulled the trigger; martyred himself for a cause, the only cause that he believed in. Alphonse.

And Alphonse would never forget that, even if the world may do. His brother had died, incomplete and broken, a patchwork of steel and boy, so he could leave a fulfilled life. And there was nothing more selfishly selfless than that.

v.** Hatshepsut's Pillars**

Loving Ed had been like loving fire, had been. Loving Ed had been violent and unpredictable so much so, she didn't even know she loved him in the first place (because she couldn't love a boy shorter than her). But Ed… Ed had his own ideas of things. She let him build his whole concept of home inside her heart, and leave the key to his happiness with her, and she vowed to herself that she would wait for him. She would become the marble of Rome's Pantheon, so when the barbarians raided and came to ruine her, she would stay forever more. And loving him… loving him was war, only twice as violent and dangerous.

Loving Al – that was different. It happened quieter, slower, and it surprised her just as much that she could love him, as it did him, but the first time she tried to kiss him he cried, and she realized that she should have never let Ed make her his home in the first place, because now she was just the shell of a house that was never lived in in the first place.

Al would never look at her as anything other than the girl his dead brother loved, and he would never love her the same way, he couldn't. And loving him was like loving the cool spring rain, and the warm sun rays of dawn on her lashes.

She was a temple of the old gods erected and discarded in the desert to the ruins. She was the road to god when believers prayed.

**vi. Calligula Rising**

He is standing at the edge of the universe, and he's been there before, walking the end of the world all alone, and it occurs to him that maybe this isn't what it is at all. A great man can live a thousand lives, ten thousand if you will, but a great man will end in the same cycle when history repeats itself. He knows that now. It is Truth.

He dies and it's scary as fuck, scarier than anything else, even scarier than the thing he thought was his mother in the transmutation circle. He dies and is reborn anew out of light and holy words and damnation, and he dies over and over again. He lives a thousand lifetimes. Ten thousand. There is no God but him, and he goes mad, and then he doesn't. He is monstrously kind or humanely cruel depending on his mood. He levels universes down. The Truth is the ultimate power and he has it. He watches the world, when he is not busy burning it. He watches them grow old and die. He never grew old. Hell, he never grew UP. Bitter, who, him? Yes.

And it occurs to him that he would have never lived with his whole body intact anyway, wouldn't have known what to do with two good arms and legs, so it's a good thing he doesn't have a body at all now. Time passes. The world forgets them. Forgets his granite monument extended to the sky and the blind furor who went mad standing in front of it, forgets the small town of Risembool and the Automail engineers… The world forgets, and eventually so does he, until he can barely recall anything. He is bored. He is so bored, all the time. He wants to amuse himself, that's all he cares about.

He stops wondering about why he didn't die, about why he's here, wherever here is in the blinding white darkness. He guards the doors to the edge of the universe and he's been here before and that's all that matters. He came back once and he never truly left. He doesn't ask himself about the Truth before him. In his mind he was always the Truth. He does not remember. He does not know. Rome burns, and people give him their souls so he can give them lies.

_Few great men are born. Most are made. None live. Some die. All do both, and one does neither. _


End file.
